The 9th Circuit ruled against advocates of a Bible-based curriculum for a charter school in Idaho in a decision filed earlier this week. Charter school or no, Nampa Classical is a government entity, the Court said, and its curriculum amounts to government speech. The Charter School Commission was well within its rights, the panel concluded, to deny the Bible-based curriculum many Nampa officials, teachers and parents proposed.
Because Idaho charter schools are governmental entities, the curriculum presented in such a school is not the speech of teachers, parents, or students, but that of the Idaho government.
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While this court has never explicitly held that a public school’s curriculum is a form of governmental speech, such a holding would necessarily follow from Downs v. Los Angeles Unified School Dist. (9th Cir. 2000). A public school’s curriculum, no less than its bulletin boards, is “an example of the government opening up its own mouth,” because the message is communicated by employees working at institutions that are state-funded, state-authorized, and extensively state-regulated.
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The Commission’s policy does not violate the Establishment Clause, which generally prohibits governmental promotion of religion, not governmental efforts to ensure that public entities, or private parties receiving government funds, use public money for secular purposes.
The decision affirms a lower court's ruling from last year dismissing the case challenging the Idaho Charter School Commission's position.
